 time speaking at work in London I graduated to the big kids room this is the first time I speak in this room it's kind of really big but thank you thank you for being here first thing in the morning so my name is Francesca you probably already know from my accent that I'm Italian this is the very thick accent I'm from Torino I am the WordPress community manager at Siteground the international web hosting company before doing that I was a freelancer building websites for other freelancers and my first year in business was a complete disaster so this talk was born from that experience and I'm honestly very happy to be the first speaker here it's always a bit intimidating to be the one that breaks the ice for everyone else but I'm happy because I think in the next few days you're going to learn a lot about WordPress and hot topics as Anna said and that will help you become a better professional you improve your professional skills but if you're not a good business owner and you don't know how to run your business then you have a problem you can be the best developer in the world you can be the best web designer in the world but if you don't know how to run your business that is a problem so here we go last week I heard Marco Chiesi who's also Italian who's also speaking at work in London in track C right now that we all learn from mistakes and if we can learn from someone else's mistakes it's even better so I hope that by sharing my failures I will save you some hot burn headache and some money I don't normally talk a lot about myself but this is really the topic of the talk so I'm gonna go through a brief history of my business in 2008 I opened the website of workers.com as a new mom to talk about my kid like most new moms do we think they are the most special creatures ever so I started a blog to talk about that and share pictures and then in 2010 I moved it to WordPress.org I remembered I took an HTML class in 1998 and I was like why not tinkering around with this website so I started to change my template add stuff and suddenly people asked me can you do the same for me I will pay you really you're gonna pay me to do this to play around with a template yeah so I started having clients unwillingly basically and in 2011 I felt that was going pretty well had a bunch of people asking me to do that so I started freelancing as a side gig and then in 2012 I thought I was ready to go I was gonna become a web designer or a website builder or whatever you call the people that tinker around with templates it went horribly in the first eight months of being in business I spent way more than I earned half of that money went into life so it was money well spent bills rent food but I have to be honest a good part of that money went in things that were not so necessary for my business a lot of it well into self-training now don't get me wrong continuous learning is very important as a professional no matter what you do but I found out that for me the self-training method e-courses e-books they don't hold me accountable so I just have a huge folder in Dropbox with e-courses e-books e-something that I never finished I also bought myself a new computer because obviously when you invoice only 2,000 euros you need a 2,000 euros machine and they say that's not the tool that make the professional stuff like that well I believed I really needed a good computer to do that and then I'll be honest I took a lot of days off because what's the thing we're going to business as freelancers because we want to be free we want to work our own hours we want to have a good work-life balance well that made for very few billable hours so that was the wrong thing to do in the first few months of my business so I had to go back to work in an office at the time I lived in Israel I find the work as an administrative manager and I did that but people kept asking me to do the website I gained some popularity through my blog and social media so people are keep asking me to build a website and I decided to do it so I was working during the day as an administrative manager and at night and during weekends as a website maker not so great for your work-life balance but it gave me the opportunity to go back revisit my mistakes learn more about WordPress and become a better business woman fast forward a year more or less and I was able to quit my job again and go solo again at the end of the 2013 I built about 18,000 euros which might sound a very little money especially if you live in London that's probably three months rent but at the time I lived in Israel and I had a very very good fiscal format that allows people that start up their business to invoice up to that point without basically paying any taxes so that was tax-free it was great it allowed me to live comfortably so what happened in those more or less 12 months how I was able to go back and get to a point where I was able to sustain myself as a free dancer I read this book which is called the right brain business plan by Jennifer Lee she's an American coach and I like my first attempts at self-straining this one went very well because get was I didn't talk I did the work I read the book and I did the homework and at the end of it I had this crazy looking business plans that I brought here for you if you want to pass it along I brought three funny looking business plans and please pass it along appreciate the navy tail of them they helped me make money and they helped me earn a living with my job so I'm very grateful for that so they helped me doing this business plan helped me get say what my goal was and get to the end of the year with that thing in mind and having a route to follow and I did it for many years to follow so what is this business plan we're talking about are you familiar with a business plan does any one of you have ever seen a business plan okay a good number of people so this is the definition you can find on Wikipedia and it's pretty accurate it's a formal statement of business goals reasons they're attainable and plans for reaching them it may also contain background information about the organization or team attempting to reach those goal except I think this is the reaction of 95 percent of the creative types when they hear a formal statement like who no no nothing formal I want to be a freelancer I want to be a digital nomad I want to kill it with my wordpress skills I don't want a formal statement well guess what you don't really need it to be so so formal so I'll break it down in plain language in Italian we have this way of saying parla come and Angie which means speak as you eat simply we eat simple food in Italian in Italy so speak as you eat and this is how I break it down so it's a way to find the clarity amongst all the wonderful ideas you might have creative types and I include developers in this category because all the developers I know have notes and notes full of ideas for new plugins how to contribute to another open source project how they can improve their talks or stuff like that so put them together okay find some clarity in all those ideas that you have and pick the one that will successfully get to the end of the line you need to write them down so ideas have this funny way of behaving when there are too many of them in our brains they tend to become all messed up and they're all you know they tend to become one so as soon as you have an idea just write it down it will help you also free space to have another awesome idea and finally it's a map you know it's like a GPS that will help you navigate your business when things will be unclear and things will be unclear believe me so after working on the business plan of my own I came up with this definition which sounds much better in Italian but this is what I came up with in English so it's a plan that will allow you to earn a living from the things you love doing and it includes goals you want to reach and metrics to check how you're doing because it's always important to check how you're doing right you don't just say what you want to do but you check yourself against those goals and since I am a creative and I was happy with the book that I read but I wasn't too happy with some of the methods and some of the exercises I came up with my own method so I wrote a book that it's available only in Italian in 2014 that it's called who's afraid of the business plan and I created a class that was taken by about 200 people online and offline so what does a business plan look like so if you're one of the people that raised their hand and say yes I saw a business plan you probably have seen something like this like a bunch of sheets that contain a lot of words and a lot of numbers this is a business plan for Yahoo for real that you can find it on Flickr so this is what a business plan looked like for me before I read the right brain business plans I did a bunch of business plans in my life as an administrative manager but these are also business plans actually in fact these are two business plans for people that took my classes and today they earn a living from what they love doing and they put on car how do you call this cardboard stock yeah and I would say that's a hen that's another word that I don't know in English hand curd cheese and stuff so they do make a living with their business with a business plan they put together like this when we when we did the course so it really doesn't matter what it looks like okay forget about it the endless papers words numbers you need a way and it doesn't matter which one it is to fix somewhere the ideas you have for your business and it really doesn't matter the format there are some sections that you always go through and I'm really fond of this format because you can keep it on your desk and peruse it every time you need it and you're going to need to do that all the time every time you need to take a decision for your business you're going to look into your way into your business plan and if it's you know easy portable format you can just keep it in your desk and use it so I did it for five years the funny-looking business plan that year I hope you're passing around were vital for my business so also I must confess in the first few months of being a freelancer I developed an insane passion for stationery so I had a lot of cute stuff to use so this is also why they're so cute and then in 2016 and 2017 I focused more on finances I tweaked a little bit the target because at that point I wanted to cater to a different audience but I put down the numbers so you know the mission was there values were there I just tweaked a little bit the finances it was important for me to know how I was going to make money so it doesn't matter if you go for a classical approach or if you go for the funny-looking website but I keep saying website that there's something fraudulent about it because I don't build websites anymore so the business plan so use the format that you want but start doing it as soon as possible so if you have pen and paper here or fire up your laptop open up a note every time I tell a rule just scribble down some words that come to you as soon as you hear me saying something and you got yourself a draft for a business plan so let's do it the first rule of the business plan is do it we all talk it's amazing even in big businesses I used to work for a company in Italy that like the first year in business they had about a million euros turn around turn over and they didn't have a business plan so it doesn't matter they started out strong they failed in about three years so a lot of companies talk about a business plan not a lot of companies have one and so this is why a lot of freelancers don't have one because we think I don't need a free a business plan I'm just you know I'm gonna do 30,000 in a year so who cares well you want to make those 30,000 so you better get yourself a plan for making that and really do it remember 2012 minus 14,000 2013 plus 18,000 the last year was in business as a freelancer I made more than 50,000 euros which is about 20,000 euros more than most of my colleagues in Italy because I had a plan I had a goal and I had a vision this is the founding concept of any business plan everything else comes from that you need to define who you are and why you do what you do use whatever method you want this is a judgment-free zone you want to do a meditation you want to do a vision board you want to ask your friends what do they think you do that's a very interesting question to ask your friends and family if they know what you're doing if they can't define what you're doing write down 10,000 words I don't care just tell yourself and then you will tell the word who you are and what you're doing it cannot be I'm here to make money well duh we're all here to make money none of us unfortunately lives off love and air so you making money is your goal but also think how you want to help other people what can you really give to them be very careful this is a very powerful statement so be very careful what you pick for so my first mission was help people give birth to their online presence in an affordable and easy way result I just got pinged for 200 euros project with a two weeks time to build the website but I said it I said affordable easy so people were asking for affordable easy and it just took tweaking that a little bit and say something like help creative people build an online presence to get me a completely different kind of requests so this is a powerful statement be very careful peek a target there can be only one the easiest way to not make money is trying to sell to everyone everyone is not a target a target has a name as a hey age has a place of living they are a person Google business personas or ideal clients you'll find a lot of templates on on Google define them as precisely as possible if you already have clients it might be easier because you might see patterns emerging if you don't have clients yet work a little bit with your fantasy but also make it believable like I wish I could say that all my clients had super Instagramable studios and amazing branding they didn't some of them that had horrible logos that were very tricky to work with and they worked out of their cabinet or basement or stuff like that so that person that target is a real person and they have a problem and you can solve the problem so this takes us to the offer so the offer when you start thinking about your offer forget about yourself you're not important here your skills are but the important thing is that you can solve someone else's problem immerse yourself in your potential client word what are their paints what are their problems what are they lacking this is where you come in so I have a very hard time when people say turn your passion into a job well if your passion is a business model that doesn't make any money don't you'll be broke make sure that your passion is marketable and someone needs it okay so solving someone's problem it's a good way to make money because they need you they need your skills so pick a target offer them something make them an offer they can't refuse so now you have a mission you have an offer you have a target you're good at what you're doing you need to market yourself and sell yourself now basically every creative person I met in my life hates this and I think Alex has a business that it's called marketing for people that hates marketing is it true Alex I'm seeing you you have a business that the tagline is something like marketing for people that hates marketing yeah everyone hates marketing who's not in marketing you know even if you check all the boxes you have the product you have the pricing the pricing is right you have the skills you still need to tell people that they need to buy your product otherwise again broke you have a passion you have a hobby you don't have a job so at first you probably be getting a lot of work by word of mouth at some point it won't be enough so you need to go and get clients I I so wish work camps had more talks about sales techniques because sometimes we get the marketing right and then when it's time to close the deal we completely miss it so sales and marketing are important again you might be the best developer in the world and you find that solution to I don't know a massive problem in WordPress but if you don't tell people that you do have that thing that you do have that service or offer it's useless all your skills are basically wasted so hustle I love it I'm a massive fan of rap music and hip-hop and when I think about myself at the end of the month getting my money and I'm really seeing myself like in a rap video making it rain like the dollars everywhere you put like envision yourself in that position envision yourself as a rapper with a dope chain made of 24 karat gold because that's the goal that's the goal you want to make money out of your business you want to make money out of the skills you have so the first year as I said it was 18,000 euros it felt good it was a bit you know comfortable not not really making it rain 18,000 euros but then I said I think I deserve more so I doubled my prices and people kept buying my services and then the third year I kept doubling my prices and people still wanted to buy my services so I learned that the first year in business I severely underestimated my services and I sold website for I don't say how much because it's degrading for the whole industry so the first year I worked on a staggering number of websites I put on like 24 websites in a year I mean if that's not hustling I don't know what it is and then the last year as a freelancer I made the same amount of money with five websites so it's possible raise your prices don't be afraid and also track everything I bet you're spending way more money than you think you are it's that new laptop it's that conference is that e-book is that oh god that pen is so nice I must have it on my desk it's the new I don't know adapters and then you keep losing them and then you keep buying them back all of the money comes up to you huge sum at the end of the year so track everything track income track expenses check your cash flow as a freelancer we have one of the worst business models ever because we get paid only when we deliver and we get paid only for billable hours so check the cash flow at all times and you need a squad again big rap and pop music so you know Taylor Swift do you know who Taylor Swift is she's a pop singer she has this Instagram account that it's full of squad goals where she takes picture of herself with her models the singers that's your mindset you need a squad you need people that will help you get to the end line there might be some other professionals you might need an attorney an accountant and notary it depends on the where you live and what kind of business you have but you need contractors don't think you can do it all by yourself you're probably gonna end up messing functions dot php file and you're gonna make a mess so get yourself a developer if you're not a developer get yourself a designer if you're not a designer you need support from your family especially the first year in business they won't see you a lot so you need to make sure you're solid there France peers people to talk about your business and rent and vent if necessary and you need to know your competition so for years I was in this wonderful pink land full of unicorns where I thought competition didn't exist we're all peers we were all sharing our knowledge there was enough work for everyone and then I went to the other side I wanted all my competitors to dial slow and horrible death so I could get more work because at that point I was getting more money and I wanted more money so the truth is somewhere in between of course competition exists you have to do research on your competition you have to see what they do how they do it what they don't do spot the opportunities in the things they don't do and even if your competition has the exact same skills that you have and they sell the exact same thing that you do you have to find a way to position yourself in a different niche use a different tone different branding go for different things don't copy the competition those things are so lame everyone will find out in about five minutes the internet is a very small place so if you start copying your competition they'll find out in about a week probably don't do that study them to do differently and to do better and finally be yourself so when my kid who's actually the reason why I had a business in the first place making websites had this wonderful book when it was growing up that was called you are you and you are special and it is true you are special now go back to your business plan see if the person the professional that you are that emerges from those pages is really you because if you need to go against your values your beliefs your lifestyle the things you like doing to get to that goal it's going to be very hard because it's going it's really hard to pretend being someone you're not so your business should reflect who you are that will make it a lot easier because you need your strength to get to the end line and this is how you do if you need to pretend so for example one in my business everyone had this lovely the business was making websites for other women in their 30s and 40s that were going through a career change that was my target so in this target if you wanted to sell something to those ladies you needed to have a super cute Instagram profile you needed to have funny videos on Facebook you needed to be really witty on Twitter I'm not like that so I did it for two years and I was like no that's not me and that's not me so I had also had to change a little bit my business because I couldn't keep up with that kind of communication okay so look carefully through this business plan and say is this me I am willing and able to provide a service like this then yes go for it otherwise change it so now there was really one thing next to do is just go to your business plan thank you I'll be here all weekend at the side ground booth so if you are more comfortable on one of one conversation just come look for me at the booth we're here at the rocket thank you yeah thank you very much for this insight for an inspirational talk thank you I'm actually was wondering when building the business model I don't think I got the question like you asked if I also looked into the business model before doing if you build a business model okay I wish I could say I did it will make me look very cool I didn't I just you know for the first part of it I winged it and I did horribly and then I thought that doing a business plan would be enough for me it was especially because the business model was pretty clear a freelance web designer so I didn't really reinvent didn't need to reinvent the wheel the wheel was already there what I did look into was my value proposition and this is why also I worked with a very specific target and the very specific target was someone like me that didn't have the technical knowledge to do what I was able to do so I worked I started my business when I was about 38 I was going through a relocation I moved to another country my marketable skills for what I did in Italy were not so easily marketable in Israel so I you know I played around with it when I was in Italy as a freelance and doing it as a side gig and then when I decided to go on business it was also because I couldn't find anything better to do in Israel that would have paid me good money and also allowed me to go to the beach when I wanted to which was very important and and so I found out that at the same time that was you know the first years of this decade of being a woman and running an online business in Italy it wasn't so common so the target was already there I just needed to reach out and grab it basically and I did so by writing on my blog for example and sharing my own experiences as a new business owner so so the business plan was already a step up on my planning but I didn't go through all that planning by the way what's your name Michael is referring to the business model canvas I think which is a very important tool also that you should use especially if you have an idea for a product or for something that it's more innovative than being freelance web designer so there's a canvas you can print it out on a big piece of paper it has nine keys I think nine areas that you will feel that's more or less the same sections that I told you about there's a there's also a book called the business model you I'm gonna I'm gonna tweet about it after the talk because those are very very good sources to get information about it so yeah that's that answer to the question I think we have other few minutes for questions hi thank you very much for your talk Francesca where are you here I'm one of those freaks that really enjoys marketing could you give us some examples of hustle that you've had to endure first of all I used my kid I not endorsing this but the dude got me a lot of money now more than he's super cute he's very nerdy he enjoys computers and stuff since he was a little kid so you know I posted and that felt horrible now that I think about it so you do this only if you're very comfortable with this so like he was playing with his computer I was working on my computer and I would take a picture of the two of us and be like working hard or stuff like that which was super embarrassing like how would you do that to your kid so I did that because like I really like money I wanted to make good money so I did that which is something that I suggest you do a if you're very comfortable be if your kid is okay with that the other thing I did is was blogging blogging was very a very good strategy for me when I started writing my blog again there weren't many women in business in Italy that were having online businesses so we kind of banded together and I created a website for a creative female in Italy that it's called the chip you because a pubo tega which in Italian means the studio and home where we started sharing our knowledge it's completely volunteer run it started out as we need a place to cry and it has now 60,000 readers every month in this super tiny specific niche that it's creative female entrepreneurs in Italy which is a kind of a big deal so blogging definitely I hate social media so I did Facebook I hired someone to follow my page and I got good results from that but I hated doing it again get yourself a squad a social media manager if you hate doing social media hire a social media manager I spoke at conferences so I lived in Israel and then my business started picking up a little bit so they started inviting me to conferences in Italy doesn't matter like Yorkshire pudding fair I'm gonna go do you want me to talk about websites no problem is this ten people a hundred people one thousand people it doesn't matter I'm gonna go I'm gonna talk about websites I'm gonna talk about why a website is so important for freelancers and what you should have and what you shouldn't and stuff like that so I took every opportunity to talk about websites so blogging social media I did horribly with a newsletter although everyone was like create a list get a list get people on your list which is very important but I didn't know how to do it so I felt misery at that networking there are groups of female freelancers in Italy and I also used to go there that wasn't a really good target for me because there were a lot of beginners and they all wanted to work together for free no guess what again make it rain so yeah did that answer to your question okay and I think we had a question here if we still have time and please come and ask me about all the other failures that I didn't put in this presentation because I still wanted to look good but if you want I'll be here the whole weekend so don't be afraid I screwed up so many times just come and ask me I'm sure I have an example yes one of the things I've struggled with is I've tried to kind of narrow down and find a niche and you know that's really good advice but I think there's a point where you have to start saying no to people if you're a bit of a generalist I'm just wondering what your experience was sort of when you did find a more narrow scope turning people down potential clients and maybe deflecting them to to other people who can help I only I want to look good so I want to say that I refer them to other people but I know the other people have to work hard like if they want to find the clients they have to find themselves at the beginning I was referring people to other people to other freelancers and guess what all those other freelancers wanted to grow so they didn't want to do in Italy is very common to do websites for 1000 euros like very simple no I wouldn't say very simple sometimes people do very complex websites for 1000 euros so you know you refer them to the people that do websites for 1000 euros and guess what they also want to do the 5000 euros websites and they will not refer them back to you so like uh-huh you have to work hard find your niche find your clients but yeah referrals are a good thing if you have a good group of people that you know they're generally going to share clients with you so you can put together a good group of people that refer to each other that's great I wasn't so lucky I actually had some of the people I referred the clients to then it came back and beat me on parts that we cannot mention so it really depends the other thing you can do it's create a product so if you find that a lot of people ask you for customization of Genesis themes or DV or whatever you can create a product where you go for example through some steps will do say which template they want what font what colors and then at the end of the process you charge them a fee and that's very easy to put together you can even hire a junior professional to do that for you and split the revenue and stuff like that also this thing about saying now it's again something that people like you have to say no more but I want to pay the bills so you know so it's a tricky why it's another thing that I think a lot of people say to make themselves look good in fact very few people turn down job jobs especially as freelancers so don't feel bad if you sometimes still get a crappy client that it's not really up to what you want project about yourself to the word sometimes you really need that thousand euros to go more to the beach so does that answer yeah yeah oh yeah it's if it's if it's something that you completely don't want to do then by all means pass it along to someone else but if it's more like you know more a question of this is not exactly what I want in my portfolio or this is not exactly the prices I'm gonna charge now well it really depends on what you're going through at that moment I think the time's up so thank you very much